Campaign Manager

1964

Campaign Manager follows young Republican campaign manager, John Grenier as he plots the 1964 presidential primaries for candidate Barry Goldwater.

The film follows the grueling day-to-day activities of campaign manager John Grenier, the twenty-eight-year old, executive director of the Republican National Committee, credited with engineering the Goldwater takeover of the Republican Presidential Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964. The film’s hilarious steak-ordering scene was later copied by Robert Redford in The Candidate.

“In a number of its approaches, [Campaign Manager] contains elements of structure and organization that are productively adopted and adapted to inform The War Room.”